Years of Poems and Spirits

During the oral defense of my paper, Prof. Chirot asked a question he’d asked us before, “would you call the nationalist sentiments in China, Korea or Vietnam ‘nationalism’”? I thought I answered it rather well: nationalism in its purest form is a Western concept. I am leaning more toward Hans Kohn (”Idea of Nationalism”) and Gellner (”Nations and Nationalism”) that nationalism is a product of the Enlightenment and/or Industrialization. It is associated with the secularization and democratization movement in the 18th and 19th century. With regard to the national identity present among East Asian polities, I stated those should not be labeled “nationalism” because “a body of knowledge only becomes so if it worked. Otherwise, it is just another experiment”.

That is what I implied in the Caribbean paper, that is, nation building does not end with declaration of independence. To expand it further, I don’t think German and Japanese nation building should be labeled as instances of nationalism, since their nation building exercises lead both to path of (self-)destruction. The polities resulted were still monarchical and authoritarian.

In short, my answer to Chirot’s question is not a teleological statement, rather it is a historicist one.

I am also reading Ann Anagnost’s “National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in China”. She frequently cited the national narrative in post-colonial countries as references. I wonder whether she’s bought into the structuralist argument of nationalism. But I have to finish reading it first. It is not an easy read by the way–I can re-write her Introduction part with phrases much easier to understand. For example, instead of saying China has large regional differences and varying ethos in recent times, she uses terms like “spatial and temporal” this and that. Scary, scary.

Just read the news on WSJ: “Federal Reserve Bank of New York Pushes For Tougher Rules on Credit Derivatives”

It looks like a quiet movement is undergoing to reverse the course Greenspan set for the Fed.

WSJ appears to be a more critical voice than the Economist in evaluating the Greenspan legacy. Not long ago, it published several pieces (e.g. “His Legacy Tarnished, Greenspan Goes on Defensive“) highlighting the downside of the Greenspan legacy: too lenient on opportunistic investors and too loose on market regulation.

Therefore, it is little wonder WSJ put Timothy Geithner’s recent speech at the top of its web page today. This is yet another evidence that Greenspan’s successors are seeing the danger in his policies and are trying to reverse the course. People may ridicule Bernanke for his seemingly wobbling response to the credit crunch earlier, particularly when he led the three quarter cut (?) after a sharp market drop. Some even wondered whether he was duped into a rookie mistake. However, the continued market slide and the weakness in the economy vindicated his foresight. Now he’s done with the cuts but still pumping heavily into repo market–seems to be another sign of determined monetary discipline.

Geithner’s efforts are equally remarkable. Those who say that financial market should remain the ultimate free market are either fools or pirates (or both). Those reckless loan or swap underwriters are no different from the lawless polluters or highway litterers. It is just as ridiculous to suggest that ordinary investors (or even conventional credit agencies) are equally responsible for the credit mess as calling regular consumers environmental polluters or labor abusers because they bought goods manufactured by wrong doers.

However, what strikes me the most is the mediocre background of the second most important central banker in the U.S., Timthoy Geithner. Something tells me this guy is a man to watch. His academic training and personal achievement don’t appear to warrant the position he is in (the President of NY Fed), and I wasn’t able to figure out his family connections either. Geithner could be a Jewish name but nothing in his personal connections suggest an outright Jewish background: his sibilings all have biblical names (David, Sarah) but David married a Catholic, it seems. He himself went to Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins. His mentors include Summers and Rubin. But if one is to survive to be the Prince of Banking, it is hard to imagine he could do without a Jewish mentor. His father, Peter, now sits on a Harvard philanthropy fund board and others (including Harvard-Yenching and earlier, the Ford Foundation) but the trail goes cold beyond that.

So who is this guy? Only 46 years old with no economics or finance training or background but presides the New York Federal Reserve. A political appointee but is well connected to Wall Street. According to a recent posting on Muckety, “If there were ever a career civil servant’s Hall of Fame, Timothy F. Geithner would no doubt be an inductee”. I certainly second that sentiment.

Anyway, two more things found about him:
An old speech on the need to regulate financial market.
A profile written by a financial reporter.

滕王高阁临江渚，佩玉鸣鸾罢歌舞。画栋朝飞南浦云，珠帘暮卷西山雨。
闲云潭影日悠悠，物换星移几度秋。阁中帝子今何在？槛外长江空自流

细草微风岸，危樯独夜舟。星垂平野阔，月涌大江流。
名岂文章著，官因老病休。飘飘何所似，天地一沙鸥.

All right … used those cryptic words to shield the true story from my parents. Here is what I wrote others of what happened on 2008/5/31 when we were rescued off a mountain by naval a helicopter … (2009/06/21)

Lisa and I went to a trail in the Hood Canal area with three other first-years from UW business school (Eileen Su and her husband and Flora Fang). The trail is called Mt. Ellinor that has a very popular route where you can sit on snow and slide down the hill for about 1000 ft. This is called glissading and is very fun. In fact, a group of people shot a video a week ago on the same mountain and after watching it, we were really excited. See the video made by others: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WwWMqWFqzY

Sat. was beautiful and the hike up was uneventful. The view at the top was spectacular. We reached the top around 4pm. The plan was to glissade down just like what those guys did in the video. But the top portion of the sliding tunnel was too deep (about 5 feet) and wall too thin with rocks and trees poking out. On our way up, we already saw a lady broke her ankle and was carried down by a dozen others. Therefore we decided to walk down next to the tunnel so we could pass that portion first.

It was a good plan except the hill is very steep: the one behind you is also the one above you. And if you looked straight, you could see people at the botton of the hill like little ants. I glissaded down first but Lisa lost her footing and fell into the tunnel. Fortunately where she fell has already passed the worst part. But she lost control and came down pretty fast. I jumped in to the tunnel and stopped her.

The story could have stopped here. But almost at the same time, a large chunck of ice–about the size of a small table–came loose from the other side of the hill and rolled down acrossed the tunnel. It skided off Lisa’s head but hit me squarely on the back. The other three sat at the top of the hill and watched in horror as the ice knocked me out of the tunnel and broke off into smaller pieces. The whole thing happened in about 5 seconds.

At first, I thought I was hit by another man. Then I looked up, I saw a large chuck of ice flying away into the blue sky. I thought it broke my spinal cord at first because it was really painful and for a while I had trouble breathing and speaking normally.

Fortunately, we were not the last group on the mountain. Another group came down the hill and one of them was a very experienced hiker. Not only he brought with him a lot extra stuff (clothing, food and first-aid), but he was trained to do outdoor first aid. Lisa thought she suffered head and neck injuries during the fall, and worried that if she moved she could suffer permanent injuries. So she layed down stiff on ice. I was conscious but needed help too. Later, another hiker heard what happened and came up with even more supplies. With their help (and thanks God for their), we were able to stay relatively dry and warm (the weather was turning cloudy and cold around 6pm). I took a Advil and the pain lessened a couple of hours later.

Although we called search and rescue at 5pm, the first group didn’t come up until 10pm. Because the earlier accident, local resources were locked up. So they had to call in volunteer rescuers from as far as Tacoma, a good 45 minutes away. Believe it or not, the first rescuer greeted us happened to be a professor in Jackson School! I never took his class before though. Otherwise, it would be even stranger.

By then, the rest of our group had come down the mountain. We told them to drive our car back to Seattle and to connect again the next day. They heard from local police waiting there that a helicopter would be brought in to get us out. However, it was already pitch dark and the clouds were pretty thick until midnight. So the original plan didn’t work out as civilian rescuers are not equipped to conduct nigh search-and-rescue.

The rescue plan changed a few times. The worst was for us to sat out until day light. Finally, they called in an U.S. Navy Resue Team from a nearby naval base. They are trained to do S-R at any time.

By then, Lisa was wrapped tight and tied up on a stretcher like a mummy in a museum. But I was well enough to walk on my own. When the chopper finally came, it was close to 2am in the morning. But it was god damn exciting:

The night was clear and stars bright. The mountain was cold but quiet. Then suddenly, you start to hear the thud-thud-thud noise approaching. A Navy H60R (the same as the Army’s Blackhawk) flew head in toward us (if you saw the movie Apocalypse Now, you’d expect Wagner’s music coming out. But it didn’t).

After a couple of surveying loops, it started to descend and hovered right above our heads. We had to kneel down and cover our faces because the powerful jet engine stirred up icy snow hitting us like little rocks. The noise by then was overwhelming. When I looked up, the chopper turned on the flood light and the dark mountain suddenly came alive. The trees nearby were blown into dancing figures by the powerful blazes. When an officer with nigh vision goggle was lowered from the side of the plane, it totally felt like a Martian was coming out of a spacecraft in a Spielberg movie.

I was lifted to the chopper first. It is pretty spacious inside and the soldiers were very well trained. Ten minutes later, we were flying toward a reddishly lit horizon that was Seattle. The flight took no more than 20 minutes I think. As I watched, the pilots flew the “bird” (as the sailors called it) right into the canyons of skyscrapers downtown and landed in Harborview Hospital.

What happened in the ER was perhaps more sitcom than drama. It turned out Lisa suffered no injury and the numbness she felt in her fingers was from the cold. X-ray showed no fractured or broken bones in me and the doctors said the pain (which is still here with me now) was due to soft tissue damages and/or bleeding. Nevertheless, from nurses to doctors, they were impressed by our situation–worthy of a mid-night mountain top rescue by the military, no less. So Lisa told and retold our stories until I fell in sleep.

When all checks were done, it was 6am. We called in our friends who drove us back to our normal, boring life. So here it is. The whole story in a nutshell.